Bill Greene’s Weblog

Legibility of sans serif typefaces

2008-04-15 · Leave a Comment

Problem: Illegibility of sans serif typefaces, especially when proportional spacing is used between characters.

Example: I have actually misinterpreted the following because the typeface used lacked serifs:

Insufficiently distinguishable text
Actual text Misreading
clark.net dark.net
modern modem
Ill 111? III?
Double Churn Double Chum
makefile.lvl makefile.M


Objection:
To be fair, legibility problems do not only afflict san-serif type. I have a file named “bsd-style.txt” that I always first misread as “bad-style.txt” when it is displayed in the Courier font.

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Categories: Publishing
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